civilized times and places to hold his queen to strict account for the
sex of her offspring. Girls for the Natchez, if they preferred them, but
the chief of the Tchoupitoulas wanted a son. She returned from the
water, came near, sank upon her knees, laid the infant at his feet, and
lo! a daughter.

Then she fell forward heavily upon her face. It may have been muscular
exhaustion, it may have been the mere wind of her hasty-tempered
matrimonial master's stone hatchet as it whiffed by her skull; an
inquest now would be too great an irony; but something blew out her
"vile candle."

Among the squaws who came to offer the accustomed funeral howlings, and
seize mementoes from the deceased lady's scant leavings, was one who had
in her own palmetto hut an empty cradle scarcely cold, and therefore a
necessity at her breast, if not a place in her heart, for the
unfortunate Lufki-Humma; and thus it was that this little waif came to
be tossed, a droll hypothesis of flesh, blood, nerve and brain, into the
hands of wild nature with _carte blanche_ as to the disposal of it. And
now, since this was Agricola's most boasted ancestor--since it appears
the darkness of her cheek had no effect to make him less white, or
qualify his right to smite the fairest and most distant descendant of an
African on the face, and since this proud station and right could not
have sprung from the squalid surroundings of her birth, let us for a
moment contemplate these crude materials.

As for the flesh, it was indeed only some of that "one flesh" of which
we all are made; but the blood--to go into finer distinctions--the
blood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, was
the blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which,